7 Filthy Jokes You Didn't Notice in Shakespeare

#3. Venus and Adonis -- Venus Commands Adonis to Go "Downstairs"

In addition to scribbling out plays laced with innuendo, Shakespeare would occasionally write poetry, also laced with innuendo. His poem Venus and Adonis, about the goddess of beauty falling in love with the sexiest man on the planet, reads more like one of Shakespeare's Red Shoe Diaries than something you'd find in a literary textbook. Check out this line, when Venus is speaking to Adonis:

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Being a goddess and all, she pretty much has her way with Adonis like this for most of the poem, until he gets killed by a boar. It's something you would write in a feverish state of bitter, premasturbatory frenzy if you had a really extensive vocabulary.

#2. Twelfth Night -- Shakespeare Sneaks the Word "Cunt" into Dialogue

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, recently rediscovered by archaeologists in a discount-bin excavation of an ancient Blockbuster as She's the Man starring Amanda Bynes, is about a shipwrecked woman named Viola pretending to be a man for the purposes of hilarious comedy.

Shakespeare was fond of all types of puns -- literal puns ("This ghost has made a grave mistake!"), visual puns, and wordplay that required the dialogue to be spoken aloud for the joke to make sense. Malvolio's line here is an example of that last type -- when the line is performed, it would sound phonetically like this:

"These be her very C's, her U's, 'n' her T's."

The stuffy old butler spells out "cunt" onstage, and immediately follows it by (phonetically) saying "and thus makes she her great pees." Essentially, Malvolio is telling everyone, "This is unquestionably my lady's vagina, with which she makes giant toilet."

There are also some vague masturbation jokes hidden in there, as Malvolio makes it a point to emphasize that "my lady's hand" is responsible for making those C's, U's, and T's end with a great gushing P.

#1. Sonnet 151 -- Shakespeare Writes a Poem About His Boner

Sonnets in the 13th and 14th centuries were traditionally short 14-line odes to beautiful women. When Shakespeare came along, he stayed mostly faithful to that tradition, writing numerous sonnets about his love for gorgeous females. However, he would occasionally shift the focus of the narrative over to his bonerific wang, as seen in this excerpt from Sonnet 151:

My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love: flesh stays no further reason
But rising at thy name doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize.

He literally says that his body "rises" at the sound of a girl's name and "points" to her. That is, his fully erect man saber is courageously battling against the laces of his breeches to leer at her through a wall of fabric like the ghost from The Frighteners. The undeniable DTF-ness of Sonnet 151 (and many of his sonnets in general) has frequently been used as a counterargument to the theory that Shakespeare was gay, second only to the sobering rejoinders "Who gives a shit?" and "What difference does it make?"

Regardless, Sonnet 151 makes it pretty clear that on this particular day, the bard really wanted to dip his quill in some lady's inkwell.